The Look of Love Face of Britain by Simon Schama

Don't go.

Don't change.

Stay with me.

Don't grow up.

Don't disappear.

Be mine.

The craving to keep the ones we love close to us

never goes away, even when they do.

They can't be with us, but their second self can - their likeness.

It can turn absence into presence, close distance, defeat time...

even death.

If you believe Pliny the Elder, all art began this way.

Corinth, Ancient Greece -

the boyfriend is going.

His girl is distraught.

She sits him down, and in the candlelight,

traces the outline of his shadow face on the wall.

Now, wherever he was, she would not lose him completely.

Most portraits, whether they're building power or making fame,

face outwards into the world,

but love portraits point in the opposite direction -

towards the body of our emotions,

to be taken out and gazed on whenever we can't do without the look of love.

It never quite works, though, does it?

Paintings can't stop time.

Those precious moments just run away from us like beads of mercury,

but it helps.

It's a May morning, 1633,

and Sir Kenelm Digby, in his house in Charterhouse Yard,

is listening to a friend tell him all about the Odes of Horace -

the favourite subject for this learned aristocrat,

courtier, gentleman.

But his mind on this beautiful morning is wandering.

It's wandering to his wife Venetia,

and he wonders why she's not up yet.

He'd actually worked late the previous night,

and had slept in a different room so as not to disturb her,

and he's very impatient for her to rise.

And then, there is a terrible scream, and Kenelm races to her room

to find her maidservant on her knees, sobbing hysterics,

and Kenelm puts his hand to her face,

touches her arm, and then her hand,

as he wrote, "that lay outside the bedclothes

"and all was cold and stiff".

And a piece of Kenelm Digby's life,

the piece that truly mattered to him, was over.

Venetia, Kenelm's wife,

was one of the most dazzling beauties of her age,

and her romance with Kenelm Digby, adventurer,

courtier and scientist, is the great love story of the 17th century.

They really were star-crossed lovers.

They had been childhood sweethearts, but their love was thwarted

by Kenelm's family, who thought Venetia beneath them.

Nothing, though, could keep them apart.

They married in secret, and by 1633,

they were darlings of the Stuart court,

proud parents of two boys, a lifetime to look forward to...

and then came this sudden death.

No-one could say why she died,

so an autopsy was ordered by the King.

Desperate to preserve what he could of Venetia

before her dismemberment beneath the surgeon's knife,

Kenelm begged his close friend Anthony Van Dyck to come quickly

and paint her on her deathbed.

Van Dyck was the greatest portrait painter of his day -

the King's painter.

This would be perhaps the most unusual portrait

he would ever undertake.

I wonder how many of you have looked on the face of a loved one

after they've passed away,

because if you have, you know that

what you're looking at isn't really them, is it?

It's just the dry husk of them -

a shell, a body casing.

Van Dyck was not going to paint that of Venetia -

it was not her husk that the distraught Kenelm wanted.

He wanted to find Venetia as he expected to find her -

beautifully asleep.

And we know from Kenelm's account

that he and Van Dyck go up to her lovely face,

and because Kenelm had this theory that her blood, quote,

"had not yet settled two days after the death",

they pinch her cheeks to give them the roses in the cheeks.

It's horrible and it's deeply touching at the same time.

So, Van Dyke gets to work, and he's Mr Tenderness.

The style of the brushstrokes are feathery, light.

It's almost as though he's whispering over her dead body,

to his friend, while he's working.

Her lips are the lips of those we love when they're asleep.

They're full-blown, they're cushiony...

Her hair is still lustrous.

So this version of Venetia was for her endlessly sorrowing husband,

still with us.

She was not cold.

She would always be with him.

When Van Dyck had finished,

the painting was delivered to Kenelm at Charterhouse Yard.

For Kenelm, this was no mere memento of his love for her -

the painting had so captured her that this was Venetia herself.

He wrote how the painting became his constant companion,

how he would gaze at it for hours on end,

and how at night, he'd prop it up by his bedside,

and by candlelight, would talk to her as if she was still with him.

While Kenelm lost himself in grief,

court gossip swirled around the circumstances of Venetia's death.

Why had she died so young?

Had she overdosed on viper's wine -

a beauty aid made from the guts of snakes?

Or worse still, in some circles,

it was whispered that Kenelm himself had poisoned her

on discovering she had been unfaithful.

In her youth, Venetia had had a name as a bit of a flirt -

the accusations even persisted after her death.

Kenelm's response was to summon Van Dyck again.

This time, he wanted art not to revive a dead body,

but to preserve a reputation.

Well, that last thing Kenelm in his terrible grief wanted was that

people should be sniggering over the tomb of his departed beloved.

He was well aware that she had a notorious reputation

for favouring many men,

so he wants a painting which is going to be an allegory of everything the

gossips say she is not.

It has to be an allegory of Venetia as chaste.

She's in a particular pose - she's in the pose of prudence.

The doves are the symbol of prudence and chastity,

as are the pearls around Venetia's neck,

as is this beautiful white silky shift.

And down at the bottom left-hand corner

is this kind of skulking, swarthy figure.

It's very important that he's sort of faintly dirty and repulsive.

And so, he's deceit, fraud -

the rotten scoundrels who dare to defame

the beautiful Venetia's reputation.

Below him is... Van Dyke is Mr Cupid,

so we've got the Cupid,

and Lady Venetia's perfectly pedicured foot is actually

standing right on his chubby belly, so lust, in the form of Cupid,

perfectly under the control of the perfectly pedicured foot.

And if, you know, you hadn't kind of passed your O-level in decoding

symbols, you can bet that Kenelm himself would give you

the guided tour, should you not be quite clear at this point that his

wife was just absolutely, as he said, "the perfectest of all her sex".

Twice now, Kenelm had called on the power of the love portrait - once

to preserve Venetia's likeness, once to preserve her public reputation.

Neither, in the end, could stem the tide of his grief.

Well, Kenelm's not just shocked and distraught at the loss

of his wife, he's destroyed by it, he's completely undone.

He can't sleep, he can't eat.

Friends, in fact, are worried for his mental health -

he won't shave his beard or trim it, he goes round in a long black

robe, he's just simply lost to the world.

Remember, at that time, you were supposed to -

whether you were Catholic or Protestant, didn't make any

difference - bend your head before the inscrutable

will of the Almighty, and Kenelm does not seem to want to do that.

So a well-intentioned friend - he had many - writes to him to say,

just stop, and Kenelm writes the most extraordinary response back.

"I must lay for a ground that the noblest

"and worthiest operation of a rational creature is love."

"If love be, then, the noblest action in man, it is impossible to

"commit any excess in the exercise of it.

"The perfectest, natural, blessed state mankind can attain upon Earth

"is the height of love and friendship between a man and a woman."

And the well-intentioned friends back off

Kenelm had used portraiture to bring Venetia back to life.

His devotion to her

and his soul-destroying grief marked him as a man out of time in an age

when you were meant to surrender to the will of the Almighty.

But as the 17th century turned to the 18th, the expression

of spontaneous, extravagant, romantic love became fashionable.

Kenelm would have felt quite at home in this new

world of starry-eyed passion.

Romantic love found expression in novels, music,

poetry and, of course, in art - in particular, in an art that you

could wear next to your heart - the miniature portrait.

Now, of course, the great thing about the miniature is that you

wear it, it's portable, it goes where you go.

So this is the 18th century equivalent of your phone picture.

You can wear it as jewellery, you can wear it - and we know that men did -

inside their shirt, on a bracelet, you can wear it as a locket.

They're intensely of you.

A miniature is art that you wear on your body.

Miniatures had been around since the Tudors, but it was

only in the 18th century that they became part of the love industry.

If you were anyone in society in Georgian England

and you wanted a miniature of your loved one, there was really

only one person you wanted to paint it.

His name was Richard Cosway and, yes, everybody had their favourite

joke, which was that Richard Cosway was himself a miniature.

He was known as Tiny Cosmetic.

And to raise himself up in dignity - high heels, naturally,

swept-back powdered hair or wig,

looked like a kind of crested grebe or something like that.

But as far as skill goes, Tiny Cosmetic was no joke.

He was absolutely fantastic.

And when you look at these miniatures, you can really see why.

He used delicate water colour and translucent paint on ivory.

He was the master of what's called stippling, which is a fancy name

for tiny, tiny dots which enabled him to do texture and shadow.

Here's a naughty one. She's gorgeous.

She has falling blonde hair, one rather beautiful breast exposed

and, as in all Cosways, it's set against a blue sky with clouds

because, even in love, there are going to be cloudy days.

This is a lovely thing, probably an inside-the-shirt number.

And here's another one, which is fantastic, of a man called

Andrew Stuart and, like the first one, the eyes are everything.

The eyes are big, intense and charming so that when you took

it out, when you took your mobile phone miniature portrait out, you

really had a sense of this person looking at you and just at you.

And this particular one, like a lot of them,

has an actual piece of your loved one's hair.

So here are locks of Andrew Stuart's hair -

blonde hair in lovely little curls.

So he is very, very good at this. This is genuinely portable art,

so it's no wonder that his trade was fantastic.

He was said to get through 12-14 sitters a day. If you were

anyone in London society and you had a passionate love and, let's face

it, in late 18th century England, there were few people who didn't,

you made a beeline for the studio of Tiny Cosmetic, Richard Cosway.

One eminent figure who beat a path to Cosway's door to exploit

this craze for the love miniature was

the embodiment of the 18th-century obsessive, love-sick romantic,

and he turned out to be a very significant customer for Tiny.

So I'm holding in my hand a wonderful

miniature of Richard Cosway's most important repeat customer -

the Prince of Wales, who goes to him over and over and over again

because the Prince of Wales never tires of having a new love,

and his standard operating procedure was to have a miniature painted

and to send it to the object of his ardent affection.

And Cosway obliges him beautifully. It's an informal picture, but

he's got himself up in as ceremonious grandeur as he possibly could.

He's wearing the Order of the Garter, that star there,

but you know that's not the kind of garter

George was usually thinking about!

Alongside his gambling, his drinking and his gluttony, the young

Prince of Wales was notorious for his serial amorous adventures.

George was a regular at the theatre

and opera, where all of London society would be on display.

It was at the opera one night in 1784 that his most extreme

seduction campaign began.

His eye was caught by this woman - Maria Fitzherbert -

and he was instantly smitten.

But she wasn't playing ball.

Twice widowed, six years older than the Prince and a good Catholic,

she was not about to audition for the job of royal mistress.

But George was not going to take no for an answer.

He even started to talk about marriage,

despite the fact that it was forbidden to marry a Catholic.

Maria resisted him and decided she had better depart for Europe,

but while packing her bags, she got a visit from the Prince's entourage.

"The Prince has stabbed himself!" they announced.

"Only you can save his life! Come quickly and come now!"

So Maria enters the bedroom and what does she see?

Well, it is not a pretty sight.

The Prince of Wales is deathly white, there is

blood absolutely everywhere, his eyes are kind of mad,

he's foaming at the mouth, he's screaming and moaning.

He's also said that he's going to tear bandages off unless

she agrees to marry him. That's the only way he's going to live.

So what a nightmare for Maria, you know, how frightening, how

hopeless it all is. And then,

the coup de grace - he produces a ring, slips

it on her finger. She has to agree to do this. What else can she do?

The thing about Maria Fitzherbert, she has a fantastic head,

she's amazingly strong and in control.

So when she goes back home, the first thing she does is draw up

a document to say that any promise to marry is completely void

when extorted under those conditions of duress - the word was used.

And then, do you know what I think she started to do? Continue to pack

her bags! She needs to get out of there and head off to Europe, fast!

Up to now, George had made a habit of sending a Cosway

miniature to the object of his affections,

but with his attempts to capture Maria reaching desperation,

he demanded from Cosway something which would overwhelm her.

The genius of the miniature came up with a simple solution -

just painting George's eye.

Well, this has to be one of the most extraordinary

objects in the whole history of the depiction of the human face.

Normally, we're in control when we look at a face -

yes, the face of the portrait looks back at us.

When it's a single eye, it's strangely possessive.

First of all, you have to be able to see

the rest of the face, even though you're only looking at one eye.

And what Cosway has done, he's provided a kind of swirling

mist, out of which the eye appears.

And the killer touch -

what makes it a remarkable little piece of art - is the catch light.

The catch light is a reflection of the light

we all see in one another's eyes. So instead of a dead eye, a fish

eye, this is an eye that's alive

with burning ardour.

How could Maria possibly refuse it?

She didn't. They were married in secret in December 1785.

Suddenly, full-on British lovers, especially any separated by

distance or social disapproval, were giving each other eye miniatures.

If your girl was playing hard-to-get, you gave her an eyeful

until she was stared into surrender.

For a man as prone to bravado as George was,

keeping his marriage to Maria a secret was almost an impossibility,

even if it got him into deep trouble with his father, George III.

Where better to let the world know but from your own private box?

So what does he do?

He stands up and he flashes, for all to see,

a miniature of the beloved Maria.

He's playing to the hoi polloi up there, he's playing to high

society and the gossip hacks down in the orchestra. And what the Prince of

Wales is saying is, yes, here we are together, but we're not just

a couple out on an opera date. We are Mr and Mrs Prince of Wales, as it

were, even if my awful, stuffy,

boring mother and father don't believe it.

We are a happily married couple. We are

George and Maria of Park Street. Now get used to it!

Everybody celebrate!

By George's standards, their relationship was amazingly

long-lasting, but eventually, they parted for good in 1811.

However, the power of Maria's image never let up its hold on him.

George IV died in June 1830. It had been almost 20 years

since he'd separated from Maria Fitzherbert. And yet,

when he was being laid out for burial, the Duke of Wellington

noticed that he was wearing a miniature of Maria around his neck.

He was not called the Iron Duke for nothing,

but he knew a lot about love and he was

so moved that he went to Maria's adopted daughter, Minney,

and told her that the King had been buried

with the image of Maria on his person.

The daughter then went to her mum and repeated the story

and what she saw was a big, fat tear fall down her cheek.

Vain, selfish, gluttonous, serial philanderer though he was,

George thought of himself as a child of nature.

He grew up in a culture, for the first time, where the playfulness

of children was seen as something to be cherished and, of course, painted.

This portrait of the Edgeworths by Adam Buck captures perfectly

the carefree hurly-burly of an 18th-century family.

By the way, it only features ten of the 22 children

sired by Richard Edgeworth, who sits at the heart of the portrait.

In 1756, or thereabouts, a painter, the one who would paint

children like no-one ever before and perhaps since, was

watching his two little girls, Mary and Margaret, chase a butterfly.

He was Thomas Gainsborough.

Well, this is the house that Gainsborough was born and grew up in.

As you can see, even the grandeur of its rooms is rather modest.

That's the way Gainsborough grew up.

His dad, John, was a sort of Jack of all rustic trades,

a master of none - he went broke,

it may be at the point that he was broke

that young Thomas was sent to London to a drawing school,

and the dad became, as best he might, a post master.

When Gainsborough comes back to Suffolk, he is very conscious

that being a painter was a way of putting bread on the table,

for his own two daughters in particular.

All his life, actually, he's one of those artists

who is a little neurotic, not to say anxious, about money,

however successful, and he'd become very successful indeed.

And how does he make his money?

He makes money by painting portraits

of the local social grandees.

Vicars and judges and property owners,

and merchants, who want to be represented

in the full swell of their social self-congratulation.

Gainsborough might become the painter society flocks to

for its portrait, but he grinds his teeth while he's doing it.

He calls it "that cursed face business".

"Damn, gentlemen. There is not such a set of enemies to a real artist

"in the world, if not kept at a proper distance.

"They have but one part worth looking at, and that is their purse."

Inside all that exercise of social,

as well as artistic obligation,

was a much greater painter, who one day would paint for love.

This is what happens when you paint for love, not money.

What you get is one of the great masterpieces of English painting

and masterpiece is not a word I use lightly, I promise you.

Painting his daughters meant a lot to Gainsborough.

He clearly had immense abundance of tenderness towards them.

Not least because the first child that he and his wife had

had died very early on, when she was just a baby.

Gainsborough presumably has gone out sketching,

and seen the two girls chasing a cabbage white butterfly.

There it is, right at the edge of the picture frame.

How brilliant is that?

Because it's right at the edge of the picture frame,

they have to reach towards it, and, in the excitement of the moment,

they're holding hands - they've clasped hands together,

so that they've become a butterfly themselves,

a gold wing on the right,

a beautiful creamy, wonderful kind of ivory coloured white on the left,

and what does that tell us?

Because Gainsborough is not just a natural painter,

he's also mighty of mind.

But the mind all comes through feelings,

and so what that tells us is that his own children

are as fragile as the butterfly,

that this perfect moment of happy glee and excitement -

"Are we going to get it, are we going to get it?" -

is also ephemeral.

This butterfly has alighted on a thistle.

Can you all see that they have come out of this kind of dark wood?

The dark wood of their dad's sorrow about a lost earlier child.

You've all felt this, mums and dads out there,

your heart being about to burst with happiness

when you look at your children

and this incredible kind of wrench that they are going to grow up,

they are going to go eventually -

it's your job to make them leave you.

They're caught in this blaze of sunshine

that's not going to last,

and the butterfly is alighting on a thorny thing.

So this is a poignant painting, as well as a happy one.

Gainsborough used all his skill as a painter

to capture the innocence of his young daughters.

But there was little he could do about the tragedy

waiting for them in adult life.

Mary had a brief, unhappy marriage and descended into madness.

She was looked after by her spinster sister Margaret until her death.

Gainsborough's portrait of his daughters

poignantly captured the fragility of children's lives.

100 years later, a Victorian writer and photographer

used the new technology of photography to record

his obsession with young children, trying to capture in images

their innocence before the passage to adulthood.

His stories for children featured a little girl called Alice,

and are saturated with an anxiety about growing up.

"Here's a question for you, said Humpty Dumpty.

"How old did you say you were?

"Alice made a short calculation and said,

"Seven years and six months.

"Seven years and six months? An uncomfortable sort of age.

"Now, if you would have asked my advice,

"I would have said to leave off at seven, but it's too late now."

The author was an Oxford mathematics don, Charles Dodgson.

Everyone knows him as the writer Lewis Carroll,

but he was also a keen amateur photographer.

His favourite subjects were the three daughters

of the Dean of Christ Church - Lorina, Edith and Alice,

who would become his muse for the fictional Alice.

If you think about it, all photography is an attempt

to fix the moment,

and what Dodgson wanted to do when he photographed

these three marvellous little girls

was to stop time,

stop time in that special moment between the age of four and nine,

when there was a kind of artless, little-animal high-spirits vitality.

Later on, Alice would say Lewis Carroll was a kind of friend of hers

and the mark of that friendship is that they were having a good time,

and Alice is something of a little actress, even at six years old -

she's posing asleep in one picture,

she knows she's being photographed,

and she's having a very good time doing it.

Dodgson's fondness for photographing the Liddell girls in coy poses

has opened him up to accusations of closet paedophilia.

But look around and you'll see images of childhood innocence

were a Victorian obsession - they wanted to keep children as children

in an age where, through child labour,

they were dragged into the adult world all too quickly.

Other photographers, including women like Julia Margaret Cameron,

created images similar to Dodgson's, uncontroversially,

though the line between artless innocence and something darker

was always a shadowy one.

Dodgson's relationship with the Liddell children

was brought to a sudden and unexplained end

by their mother in 1863.

There were to be no more photographs of them as children,

but Dodgson still had one more picture to take of Alice.

In the summer of 1870,

Charles Dodgson writes in his diary that a wonderful thing has happened.

It's clearly a surprise to him.

Seven years before, in 1863, Mrs Liddell has banned Dodgson

from taking any more photographs of her daughters.

In 1870, she's brought them back -

she brought Alice and her sister back.

Why has she done that?

In order to have marriage photos taken.

Photos of young women who have become of a marriageable age.

The standard pose in this romantic dreaminess is the gaze upwards,

the gaze in the far distance.

Something like that.

That's not what we're looking at, is it?

Alice is looking down, her brows are slightly furrowed.

Her lips are pursed.

She's an unhappy bunny, there's no doubt about this.

She feels awkward in her womanliness.

Or has Dodgson posed her,

so that he loads her with a sense of his regret,

his regret for her vanished girlhood?

We'll never know what's going through her head and her heart.

What this picture says

is Alice is no longer in Wonderland.

Dodgson's photographs of Alice

were about trying to capture something he couldn't have.

The permanent girl-child who had been his friend and muse.

So it was with some of the most powerful love images

of the Victorian era -

they were driven by thwarted desire.

This is not just a portrait of a strikingly beautiful woman,

it's also a portrait of a relationship.

One of the most spectacularly tormented menage a trois

in all of English history.

The woman is Jane Morris.

Her husband, who commissioned the portrait,

is designer, writer, socialist, William Morris.

The painter is Dante Gabriel Rossetti, not her husband.

The painter wants the sitter very badly indeed,

and he can't have her,

and the way he can have her,

the way he can possess her,

is to paint her, to paint this.

Rossetti - painter and poet -

was a founder member of the Victorian art movement,

the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

He first saw Jane Morris when she was just 17.

He was a young painter,

she was a stableman's daughter from Oxford.

Enchanted by her beauty, he asked her to model for him.

But they weren't fated to be together.

Jane very soon married one of Rossetti's closest friends,

William Morris.

Rossetti also married, but his wife, Lizzie Siddal,

tragically died young of a laudanum overdose.

After Lizzie's death, Rossetti used any pretext to be with Jane

and to gaze at her.

In 1865, at his house in Chelsea,

he commissioned a series of photographs

in preparation for her portrait.

These extraordinary photographs are records of a passion,

which was starting to smoulder and burn,

and eventually will burst, for Rossetti, into full flame.

She's already been made love to, intensely,

by the way Rossetti is lighting her.

What's being made love to?

The swan-like throat,

the extraordinary waves of her hair,

the thickness of the eyebrow.

And, above all, an obsession in Rossetti's poetry, her mouth.

This mouth, which at once is curved like a lyre

and full of promise for Rossetti.

Take a look - this is not the product of my overheated imagination.

This is Rossetti on fire.

Despite being hemmed in

by the suffocating rules of Victorian society,

Rossetti found a way of being with Jane,

here at Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire,

a summer home jointly rented by Morris and Rossetti.

In the summer of 1871, William Morris went off to Iceland,

leaving Rossetti alone with Janey and her two children.

So, William Morris, who rented Kelmscott Manor,

where we are, called it heaven on earth, and, boy, he was right.

Morris's beautiful idea was that everybody should be surrounded,

even in the day and age of the industrial world,

by things that were of nature.

Rossetti could not possibly have applauded that more,

but his nature was amorous, sensual,

it was the nature of the body,

and so you feel this kind of desperate union

between two different kinds of nature almost in every room.

We have three bedrooms.

On my left is Jane Morris' bedroom.

It's the symphony in green.

And then there is William's room.

So you'll have to imagine that summer of '71,

this room is empty,

and then there's Rossetti's studio here.

And this is one of the most beautiful rooms ever,

anywhere in the world.

Here's Rossetti's paint box.

It's covered in dust, it's old, it is extraordinary.

Again, it's not gussied up in any way.

So, this is the paint box as it was left.

This is actually a box of memory.

The paint is caked and clotted.

Some of those gorgeous kind of Pre-Raphaelite colours -

greens and yellows and ochres -

are the colours they favoured most.

This is like a graveyard of passion.

What lay at the heart of Rossetti's obsessive painting of Jane?

It was the only way he could possess her,

something he made explicit in one of his poems, called The Portrait.

It was written in the full early swell of Rossetti's passion.

And listen to its last line.

Above the long lithe throat

The mouth's mould testifies of voice and kiss

The shadowed eyes remember and foresee.

Her face is made her shrine.

Let all men note

That in all years (O Love, thy gift is this!)

They that would look on her must come to me.

So, it couldn't last. Of course, it didn't last.

And, eventually, he goes. In the autumn, his poetry volume comes out.

It's viciously attacked as being indecently sensual.

And he's affected by this, and in despair he hits the laudanum bottle

in a horrendous way.

He downs an entire bottle of laudanum.

He survives, but some of the wiring is unstuck.

Rossetti suffered a nervous breakdown,

and his time with Jane at Kelmscott came to an end.

His latter years were racked by illness, drug addiction

and alcoholism, but he continued to paint portraits of Jane.

There is painting after painting, grandiose paintings.

Astarte, the Syrian goddess. More of them,

all of which feature the extraordinary image of Janie.

That strong nose,

those waves of raven hair.

That mouth...like a bow.

They would never leave him, right to the point where he dies.

Rossetti was a child of Victorian culture.

Even in the throes of sexual desire for Jane, he idealised her body.

He made it at once unattainable,

and desirable. He's always outside it.

But there were other sort of love. Violent love. Mutually savage love.

And there were other types of love portrait,

where harshness replaced tenderness.

Where flesh was turned inside out.

Portraits, including love portraits,

are, as many of its practitioners had always said, face painting.

That's exactly what you don't get from Francis Bacon.

He chews up the face

so that we can never actually really get that eyeballing connection.

And if you think the face is the location of tenderness

in love portrait, that's what he prevents us from reaching.

For Bacon, love was indistinguishable from sex,

and it was hard love.

It was painful, atrocious, cruel, mutually destructive,

but, insofar as it was destructive, it was profound.

It was getting inside the body.

And in Bacon's great paintings,

there's no boundary between the inside and the outside of the body.

When Francis Bacon did these kinds of paintings,

it was all about spilling his guts.

That's what I think he felt we do,

however sentimental we might get about love.

It's a terrible insight and it has a great deal of truth in it.

In the early 1960s, Francis Bacon was at the height of his powers.

As a portraitist, he would paint from within his own circle of Soho

bohemians, gay friends and lovers.

But he would only work from photographs.

It allowed him free rein to pull their faces apart.

If I like them, I don't want to practise the injury that I do

to them in my work before them.

If I like them.

I would rather... I would rather practice the injury in private,

by which I think I can record the facts of them more clearly.

There was one model who Francis Bacon painted more obsessively than

anybody else. And his name was George Dyer.

He was about 30-something when they met. Bacon was in his 50s.

They met in a pub like this.

Just who picked who up, history will never finally tell us,

but it doesn't matter.

They fell deeply and pretty much immediately in lust.

Dyer was quite good looking in a way that we used to call

the wideboy look. Bit of pompadour going on.

And Bacon was attracted to him

because he saw something other than the tough, even though

Dyer was a small-time crook who'd done a bit of time in prison.

George was completely spellbound

and overawed by the very successful Francis Bacon.

All that money, all this beer money, loads of parties,

all the posh friends.

You could sort of feel the spell he was under.

But they became intimate.

It's not stupid or sentimental to sort of use that word.

Bacon only liked to paint people he knew really, really well.

And he got to know George Dyer very well indeed.

And great art came out of that.

But the relationship soon soured.

Bacon and his circle became tired of George's neediness and drinking.

The more insecure George became, the more he drank.

The relationship reached its tragic climax in October 1971,

when Bacon and Dyer travelled to Paris to attend a full-scale

retrospective of his work.

Two days before the opening, Dyer was found dead at their hotel,

apparently of an overdose of drink and drugs.

Bacon barely broke his stride. He attended the show as normal.

He wasn't going to pour out his emotions in public.

That, he saved for his art.

Everything escapes you.

You know that perfectly well.

You know even if you're in love with somebody, everything escapes you.

You'd want to be nearer that person.

How can you cut your flesh open and join it with the other person?

It's an impossibility to do.

You may love somebody very much, but how near can you get to them?

You're still always unfortunately sort of strangers.

Not long after Dyer had died, he began to think

and then execute enormous works, which was the way

he dealt with this immense surge of guilt about the way he behaved

and also the after-shock, the trauma, really, of what had happened.

And the results of what are called the Black Triptychs,

these astonishing sacred pieces,

these gay altarpieces,

are really among the most profound things ever painted

by anyone in this country.

And we go immediately to the heart of the triptych - in the middle,

there is the coupling of Francis and George.

The tangled writhing of bodies, engaged in this dance of death.

Horizontal out on the floor.

On one side is George himself

with the whole of his central part eaten away.

Bacon has painted him with closed eyes,

as if his eyes had been closed in death.

As much in a state of communion with the afterlife,

not in the process of actually committing suicide.

And there on that side is Bacon himself.

He, too, in his underwear, is leaking the life out of himself.

And this whole thing, like the tradition of triptychs,

is a great theatre,

a profound theatre of physical torment.

And distress.

And Bacon did it, I think... I hate this word "closure",

but that's what he was trying to do.

We're very lucky that he could almost never find it

because he went on doing these great pieces.

Bacon's triptych was a lament for his former lover,

but registering the muscular force of love doesn't always have to be

a picture of destruction - something that occurred to British artist

Jenny Saville at a life-changing moment in her own career.

This time it was birth, not death,

that was the spur for a love portrait.

Well, I was pregnant, so I had two babies in a 12-month period.

-Wow.

-And I was painting as usual, you know, painting bodies,

but the sensation of producing a body inside my body

and painting flesh was so powerful that the sense of reproduction

or the, you know... When I was trying to articulate flesh

on the outside, my body was trying to articulate flesh on the inside.

I had comments with people saying,

"Oh, well, your life is different now".

And that begins to grate because you think, what's happened?

And a lot of people say women lose their creativity,

and I felt completely the opposite of that - I felt absolutely on fire.

So I just thought, I have to address this front-on.

You know, I actually thought,

Picasso, Leonardo, Michelangelo,

none of them had felt this because they didn't have a baby, so I've

got this insider view. I've just got to go for this, I've got to do

everything I can to articulate this in the best way I can.

And I started to feel the same sensation that I felt

when I was growing flesh, which is key to me.

When you can match your material qualities with the sensations

you feel, either by looking or feeling, then you know you've

got something you can work with.

Was there anything at all about saying,

"I want to get this particular moment of robust ferocity"?

I knew through the whole thing, the whole pregnancy, the birth,

everything, I thought, this is a moment.

You know, if you pick up a child that's one year old, it's like an

octopus, you've got to hold on to them, their legs are heavy

or they can be completely exhausted or frantic.

You know, it's quite a shock when you

have a child scream at full pelt.

You know, if you had an adult screaming

like that, you'd have a completely different opinion of that.

You'd be shocked.

As a parent, you have to get used to the fact that the

child is absolutely screaming and what they want is your protection.

All through my life I've seen things that are

the touchstone of what it's like to be alive. Those moments

when you think, "This has got condensed humanity in it,"

and that's what drives you as a painter if you work like that.

I mean, it was a survival tool, too, because that's the way that

I deal with everything, that I deal with whatever is

happening in my life - making art is a way to survive.

It's my language, really. Drawing or painting is my language.

The power of love portraits comes from their yearning to catch

for ever the most precious moments of our lives

and the foreknowledge that, in the end, time can't be stopped.

Though the way it gets expressed changes over the centuries,

the heart of the story is the same.

Even the one in my own lifetime, which captured that poignancy

most intensely, has something of the eternal heartache about it.

I said at the beginning of the film that all love portraiture is

essentially a private thing. It's just meant for the delight

of the parties concerned, the lovers, but it's not the whole truth,

is it? Inside every passionate relationship, there is something

which wants to skywrite it, to show it off to absolutely everyone.

This was the case with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, the most famous

love relationship of the late '60s and '70s.

But they weren't staging their love as a public event out of any

sense of vulgar celebrity exhibitionism.

It was exactly because John knew that the Great British public blamed

Yoko Ono for breaking up the Beatles and felt so malicious towards

her that he wanted to say, not just is my love none of your business,

but, actually, open yourselves up to how sweet and innocent it is.

Some of the things people have said about you haven't been very

kind lately, does this get you down?

Well, it's so much that it got past being depressing

and it's gone into a joke again.

It was a bit depressing, the way that they kept picking on Yoko

and saying that she was ugly and all personal things like that,

but I know she isn't, so...

After the break-up of the Beatles,

John and Yoko finally settled in New York in 1971.

Their relationship went through a rocky patch,

but by the end of the decade they were together again.

Rolling Stone magazine wanted a cover shot, and sent

photographer Annie Leibovitz to their Manhattan apartment.

It was the last picture taken of John alive.

Hours later, he was shot dead.

I was in America when John was shot and killed, and a month

later, like everybody else, I bought this copy of the Rolling Stone.

And look at it, you know, the thing is so battered

and bruised. It brings back this great

surge of desolation that we all felt and, it's ridiculous,

everybody was so proprietary about the Beatles, we just

felt what you feel when someone very close to you has been taken

from you - you feel cross with them, you feel angry at being abandoned.

And I remember when I first saw the photo, I think, part of the

sense in which it became such an overwhelming vehicle for our sense

of loss is this astonishing kind of tenderness that hangs over it.

And what it says to us, of course, is it's not just

a sort of love of two lovers,

husband and wife. It's also the love of mother and child.

John was abandoned by his mother Julia as a child,

but she was still so important to him.

He talked about her as his muse, the only other muse apart from Yoko.

And, of course, I am not doing rubbish psychiatry on you all.

It wasn't that Yoko Ono was the mother he never had, but, clearly

the toughest, most laconic, darkest of the Beatles

was looking for a home.

He was looking for the peace that love gives...

..and he found it with her.

He found it with her. He found the home.

He found a place to give peace a chance, they had a child.

That was it.

So I think, actually, even if what was going to happen to him

five hours after this picture was taken had never

happened, it would have been an overwhelming thing to see

the overwhelming love portrait in my lifetime, as it still feels.

Because within it is the love of mother and child, of husband

and wife, of lover and lover.

This is the portrait of every kind of love.

MUSIC: Eternity's Sunrise